Cool Stuff2009 Notable Entries
Mug Shots
St. Petersburg Times
Mug Shots posts mug shots from Tampa Bay County along with biographical information of each arrested individual. This information is available publicly through the Sheriff’s website, but is not user-friendly. Mug Shots is intuitive, simple and visually pleasing. This system is affordable, as a newsroom staff is not needed to gather these public records. In May alone, Mug Shots had 6.9 million page views.
Demotix
London, England
Citizen photojournalists and professional freelancers post their photos on Demotix, allowing for them to market themselves outside of traditional outlets. Demotix licenses the best work to newspapers. Users create 100% of the site’s content and monitor for suspicious activity. Over 5,000 users worldwide participate. They say they post 50 stories a day.
SeeClickFix
Over 4200 citizens use SeeClickFix to instantly upload pictures, stories, videos or comments about non-emergency issues in their local areas to the web. These hyperlocal issues are then posted on the web or used as news in various outlets. Almost 900 geographic communities have been represented, resulting in 30 traditional news stories.
Bank Tracker
http://banktracker.investigativereportingworkshop.org/
Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University
The Investigative Reporting Workshop’s BankTracker, done in cooperation with msnbc.com, was the first online tool that permits a user to look up the health of any bank in the nation, using information from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The project simplifies complex data using charts and interactive tools that would not normally be possible through traditional media channels. The partnership with msnbc.com has created substantial site traffic for the project: March 17 through June 7 the site had received more than 128,000 visits and nearly 1.6 million page views.
Breaking News
http://newsok.com/weather/playground
NewsOK--The Oklahoman
The Oklahoman and NewsOK.com used Internet chat software to have real-time conversations with audience while streaming live video event coverage. They also blogged and used Twitter to break news faster. During an ice storm, 13,000 people logged into the chat and chatters and Twitter users were directing reporters to specific locations to check driving conditions. Coverage of that storm and of a tornado-producing series of storms each broke 1 million page views in 24 hours.
What Is Barack Doing?
http://www.whatisbarackdoing.com
What Is Barack Doing? aggregates presidential news from many different sources, from the major networks to social networks to the White House itself. It uses good Web design practices to increase usability and accessibility.
Rio Nuevo Audit
http://www.azstarnet.com/special/rionuevo-dollars
Arizona Daily Star
Arizona Daily Star investigated the Rio Nuevo project and made thousand of paper records available online. The Rio Nuevo project was supposed to revamp Downtown Tucson but since its inception in 1999 little progress, if any, has been made. Because of the ADS’s reporting and investigation, the public has been made aware of the project’s mismanagement and as a result, control of the project has been taken from the City Council by the Arizona Legislature and both the City Manager and Project Director have been fired. The Star’s Rio Nuevo investigations are innovative because they created a detailed and searchable list of what the city had spent redeveloping Downtown—information the public craved and learned for the first time from the paper.
Map of the Week
http://thestar.blogs.com/maps/
Toronto Star
Map of the Week is an ongoing series of interactive maps on the Toronto Star’s Web site based on the Google Maps API, anchored by a blog (thestar.blogs.com/maps). The subjects range from the serious, like reports of sexually transmitted disease or postal codes of drunk driving suspects, to maps that are just interesting, like dog licences or the range of urban bees. Often the maps are based on open-source data, but more typically are created from information obtained under access-to-information laws.
The Sacramento Press
http://www.sacramentopress.com
Robust local online news site covers Sacramento with contributions from more than 400 volunteer community reporters. The site allows comments and ratings on articles and aggregates relevant RSS feeds. It posts 10-20 new articles each day and receives more than 30,000 visits per month.
News Mixer
Medill School, Northwestern University
Six Medill/Northwestern graduate journalism students set out in September 2008 to solve two problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults. The site uses the Facebook Connect feature to allow users to stay connected via Facebook and post comments. The site concentrates on the Easter Iowa area and is geared toward young adults and high school age teens.
DavidsonNews.net
DavidsonNews.net is a community news website covering Davidson, N.C. They combine volunteer reporting by veteran journalists with citizen contributions and links to other sites. The site helps build community by providing a common frame of reference, shared stories, and a forum for discussion. DavidsonNews.net covers Town Hall, community events, schools, churches, and other institutions, including the town’s major employer, Davidson College.
Jobs Database
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-02-06-new-jobs-growth-graphic_N.htm
USA Today
The Jobs Forecast gave readers a unique way to look at predictions by moodys.com about where employment would grow, and in what job categories. The data is displayed on the USA Today page and encourages readers to dig deeper and deeper into the data through rich charts and visuals.
TimeSpace
http://specials.washingtonpost.com/timespace/
Washington Post
TimeSpace is a map and timeline interface that displays thousands of media items from around the globe. The interactive map allows users to explore the world and see where news is happening. TimeSpace is a newsroom tool that provides journalist a way to aggregate multiple sources of content and present them in an intuitive map and timeline interface. Currently, there are five versions of TimeSpace presenting more than 10,000 items per day and receiving more than 1 million page views per month.
The Big Picture
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
Boston Globe
The Big Picture is a project created to create a home for big pictures, not in gallery form, maximizing the impact of expanding monitors. The site is based around comment sections and uses a blog format to display pictures. Since its inception, several other prominent news companies (Wall Street Journal and New York Times) have created mirror sites to emulate The Big Picture.
Your Uncommon Economic Indicators
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/economic_indicators/
WYNC Radio
The project is an online project on WNYC.org where listeners spend time on the site and where they come to share stories about the economy. There are multiple ways for visitors to see indicators and share their own including: a drop-box submission form, photos or video, and an address bar that locates the story on a Google map. Viewers can choose from 6 category icons such as Behavior, Housing or Bright Spots, and see each entry or see a photo display and a 26-page (and growing) chronological story archive. Many stories end up on-air as part of WNYC’s economic reporting.
Stories That Fly
Kent State University
Students, professional and participant journalists work in this online lab to experiment with new approaches to improve the public understanding of general aviation. They feature stories that largely go unnoticed in the regular coverage of environmental, business, health, economy, technology, agriculture, sports and entertainment news. Stories that Fly is an online magazine and blog. Utilizes an enormous amount of internet functionality including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Digg.
GlobalPost.com
Covering international news with a network of more than 65 correspondents in 45 countries, “GlobalPost” discusses topics of economy, politics, and culture in poorly covered countries. Since its start in January 2009, it has attracted more than 2 million visits from over 200 countries and more than 7,500 other Websites have linked to them. It also provides readers a chance to participate in the editorial process by Passport Stories, which reports are proposed by members, voted on by the membership, and then edited by professional journalists.
NCPR Dynamic News Maps
http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/newsmap.html
North Country Public Radio
North Country Public Radio is creating the “NCPR Dynamic News Maps” project using mapping tools that encode location information into news and events through a content management system, and the use of geoRSS to deliver the content onto maps generated by Google Maps API. In seven days the maps received a 2.74% increase of page views since the first day. The project will use professional and citizen journalists to update information in near to real time to viewers from hundreds of villages, towns and small cities with distinct diverse communities.
The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America’s Schools
http://www.smokestack.usatoday.com
USA Today
The USA Today investigative team created a searchable database that analyzes what pollutants and health risks children are exposed to at their school. It has received attention from concerned parents, local governments, senators, and the EPA, and has prompted change in air monitoring practices at schools across the country. They claim 1.7 million page views of the database and 8,000 letters to members of Congress.
AP Economic Stress Index
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_national/stress_index_premium
Associated Press
The AP Economic Stress Index combines unemployment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy data down to the county level to create an index of the overall health of the economy. The data are displayed on a clickable map and the data can be mashed up in several ways to dig deep into the numbers.
Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report
http://twittervotereport.com http://inaugurationreport.com
NPR
A free tool for the public to report any voting irregularities they experienced. As reporters could not cover each county on election day, this allowed citizen journalists to instantly submit stories, later outputted through widgets and the web. Over 12,000 reports were received. The same system was used on inauguration day, with over 40,000 reports coming in.
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